You have worked early and late to buy your wife even more luxuries than you really could afford.  But you love her so much that it was your greatest pleasure to heap good things upon her.  And very nice of you it is.  You are a dear, good man to do it, and I honor you for it.  Her physical needs are abundantly supplied.  Indeed, you are so good a lover that you remember your courting-days enough to send her flowers on her birthdays and Easter.  So her sentimental needs, represented by flowers, are supplied.

There remain but two needs more.  Those of her mind and heart.

It is too delicate a subject to discuss whether you are clever enough for her.  Very likely you are.  If not, she ought to have attended to that before she married you, because that is one of the few things that you really can know something about during an engagement—­if you are not too much in love to have any sense left at all.  Therefore again I take for granted that you and she are congenial.  If she is devotedly fond of music, you do not hate it so that you cannot occasionally go with her in the evening to the opera, with abundant props in the shape of tickets for the matinee, to which you generously bid her to “take one of the girls.”  If she loves books, you like to hear her talk about them, because she does it so well, and because she knows the ins and outs of your mind so thoroughly that in ten minutes she can give you the plot, and half an hour’s reading aloud of striking passages will give you so excellent an idea of the style that you can talk about it to-morrow more intelligently than some bachelors who have really read it by themselves most conscientiously.  That is because you are clever; because your wife is more clever.  You have a brain, and your wife photographs her personality and her subject upon it, because she understands you and has studied you, and has a pride that you shall appear to advantage among her friends and not degenerate into a mere business machine, as too many men do.  I suppose it never occurred to you to try to do a similar thing for her.  You could, if you wanted to.  But it is a good deal of trouble, and you are generally tired.  But what do you suppose would happen if you should exhibit the same eagerness that she does to keep the flame of love alive, so that your marriage should not sink to the dead commonplace level of all the other marriages you know?  Suppose, even after you have caught the car, that you occasionally got off and ran beside it a while, just for healthful exercise, and to keep yourself from growing ordinary?

Suppose you occasionally hunted out a new book, and marked it, and brought it home to read to her, not because you think she wouldn’t have got it without you, but just to show her that you are trying to pull evenly, and that you wanted to do something extra charming for her in her line, and to prove that you have a conscience about keeping this precious, evanescent, but carelessly treated love at a point where it is still a joy.  It is a sad thing to get so used to a beautiful exception like love that you never think of it as marvellous.